Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and conceptual artist who works in Minimalism.
Background
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born on February 23, 1948, in Tokyo, Japan.
According to the artist, in his childhood, he was fascinated by such views as the ocean horizon and tried to find new looks on the world. Later, he applied the images he had seen in his artworks.
At the age of twelve, Hiroshi received a photo camera from his father and started to experiment with photography. He took pictures of Audrey Hepburn when watching her acting in the movies.
Education
Hiroshi Sugimoto received a degree in politics and sociology in 1970 from the Rikkyō University (also known as Saint Paul's University) in Tokyo.
After graduation, he had a trip to the Soviet Union, Poland, Western Europe and the United States. It was there that he decided to retrain and became a professional commercial photographer. To fulfil his goal, he enrolled at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1972.
While in the United States, Sugimoto explored the Eastern philosophy.
Career
Hiroshi Sugimoto started his professional career in New York where he had moved in 1974. To earn his living and develop his skills in photography, Sugimoto assisted different commercial artists of the field. He also visited various shows and art galleries to explore the contemporary art. The collections of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City inspired the artist on his first original series of photographs called Dioramas in 1976. Sugimoto continued this project in 1982, 1994 and 2012.
Two years after his debut photo artworks, he began to take pictures of the old American movie theaters and drive-ins that lead to the appearance of the surrealist in view Theaters images. Perhaps, the old interiors of these places inspired the artist and his wife to open in 1979 the Japanese antique shop which provided the photographer with income and artistic contacts. The shop had functioned for ten years during which Sugimoto met such representatives of the Minimal and Conceptual Art movements, like Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin.
The next photo series, Seascapes, made with an old fashioned large-format camera came in 1980 when Sugimoto’s artistic mind was caught by the sea and the views of its horizon. The photographer presented these and other artworks a year later on his debut solo exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York City.
In 1995, Hiroshi Sugimoto had his solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exposition gave a boost to his popularity and the artist travelled to Kyoto where he took photos of the Sanjūsangen-dō ("Hall of Thirty-Three Bays").
In two years, he obtained a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago on a series of large-format photos of well-know buildings of the world. The similar architectural project depicting the edifices of the Modernist architecture was undertaken later, in 2002-2003. Among the sights the artist photographed was the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The text for the book on the series were provided by the American author Jonathan Safran Foer.
The commission from the Deutsche Guggenheim museum in 1999 pushed the photographer to return to the photos of exhibit items. This time it was wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives made from the portraits of the 16th century. Placing the items in front of a black background, Sugimoto tried to imitate the lighting which might have been used by the painter. Later, the photographer enlarged the series dubbed Portraits by the photos of wax figures made from other notable personalities, like Fidel Castro or Princess Diana.
In 2009, the artist organized the Odawara Art Foundation in order to popularize Japanese culture.
Thereafter, Hiroshi Sugimoto tried his hand as a designer of the objects he photographed as well as of the interiors in which he took pictures. These activities led to some number of commissions on the decoration of more huge spaces from restaurants to art museums.
So, the photograph hired three qualified architects and opened in 2008 in Tokyo the architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory. Among the architectural projects Sugimoto worked on Shinto shrine for the Naoshima Contemporary Art Center, the rock garden for the Sasha Kanetanaka restaurant in Omotesandō, Tokyo (2013) and some number of teahouses.
One of the artist's recent projects is the Enoura Observatory in Odawara, Japan which he opened in October, 2017. The museum demonstrates the attributes of the traditional Japanese culture, like Sugimoto's collection of antiques, teahouse or the performance places of Japanese theater.
According to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, D.C., United States Hiroshi Sugimoto is hired in 2018 to redesign the interior of its building designed by an architect Gordon Bunshaft.
Except the above mentioned exhibitions, the photographer presented his artworks during his career in such museums and galleries, like the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, the Serpentine Gallery in London, United Kingdom, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain and Gagosian Gallery, both latter in Paris, France.
Views
Hiroshi Sugimoto believes that minimalism and simplicity both in photography and architecture help viewers to capture better the main meaning of the artwork.
Through the photographs made according to that idea, the artist transmits his understanding of such abstract concepts as time, vision, belief, the fleetness of life and the conflict between life and death.
For Sugimoto, the photography is an instrument which can capture the time.
Quotations:
"I somehow feel we are nearing an era when religion and art will once again cast doubts upon science, or else an era when things better seen through to a scientific conclusion will bow to religious judgment."
"Every time I see the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing."
"I became interested in seascapes because they relate to memories from my infancy: the very earliest thing I can picture is the sea."
"In my dreams as a child, I often floated in midair. Sometimes I'd leave my body and watch my sleeping self from on high near the ceiling. Like a out-of-body projection perhaps, a waking self coexisting simultaneously with a sleeping self. Even as an adult, I habitually imagine myself airborne. Might this be at the root of my artistic spirit?"
"The idea of observing the effects of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates reflects my desire to re-create the major discoveries of these scientific pioneers in the darkroom and verify them with my own eyes."
"I imagine my vision then try to make it happen, just like painting, (...). The reality is there, but how to make it like my reality."
"It was my goal to visualise the ancient layer of human memory with the means of photography."